Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
By signing up, you certify that you are female and accept the Terms of Service and have read the
Privacy Policy.

The Ungodly Constitution: How the Founders Ensured America Would Not Be a Christian Nation

The Ungodly Constitution: How the Founders Ensured America Would Not Be a Christian Nation

The founders made a noble effort to say goodbye to all that
in order to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their
posterity.

June 19, 2012 |

Photo Credit: Jasmic

When I was growing up
in the fifties and sixties, almost no one in politics or everyday life
went around proclaiming, “I am a Christian.” If indeed you were a
Christian—that is, someone who considers Jesus Christ the Messiah—you
identified yourself as a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Baptist, a Catholic,
and so on in excelsis in order to let others know where you stood in the vast American religious landscape.

Calling
oneself a Christian today, by contrast, has a special, politicized
meaning. For most people in public life, this self-identification
suggests a particular form of conservative Christianity, a brand of
religion that seeks not only to proselytize but to impose its values on
others through the machinery of the state. The huge exception to this
rule is President Barack Obama, who has been forced by the
birther-paranoids to advertise his credentials as a Christian in order
to refute the lie that he is a “secret Muslim.”

Once
upon a time (until around 1980, actually), the appellation “Christian”
used to mean “right-wing Protestant,” as a consequence of the historic
animosity between many forms of American Protestantism and the Roman
Catholic Church. That is no longer true, as demonstrated by GOP primary
hopefuls Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the darlings of Protestant
fundamentalists, although they personify the cliché “more Catholic than
the pope.” (In Gingrich’s case, the relevant pontiffs would be certain
medieval and Renaissance vicars of Christ who produced numerous children
through extra-pontifical liaisons.) Santorum is in fact a Catholic
fundamentalist—unlike the majority of American Catholics, who do not
accept either the notion of papal infallibility or the Vatican line on
sexual behavior. Liberal Catholics, well aware of the political meaning
of Christian in American politics, generally call themselves plain old
“Catholics.”

Thus, when Santorum
and Gingrich used their dog whistles throughout the Republican
primaries to imply that Obama is not the Christian he claims to be, what
they really meant is that he is not their kind
of Christian. It has also become standard for politicians to offer a
nod to “our Judeo-Christian heritage” in an effort to display theocratic
inclusiveness. The slippery Gingrich never stumbled over this phrase,
but Santorum often did, dragging Judeo out
to four syllables so that it came out “Jew-day-ee-oh.” It is clear that
this ecumenical platitude was not a part of the sanctimonious
Santorum’s upbringing.

Was the
United States founded as a Christian nation, meaning that the framers of
the Constitution established a government whose laws would not only
reflect but also enforce the rules of a particular brand of
Christianity? No, period. The answer is as clear as Santorum’s
pronunciation of Judeo is
slurred, and the explanation can be found in the old (i.e., pre-1980)
American practice of identifying oneself by denomination.

Denominational
identification is as old as the earliest colonies in the New World,
given that the first Puritan theocrats were fleeing persecution by
adherents of another denomination—the
Church of England. By the revolutionary era, doctrinal and intellectual
distinctions separating one Christian denomination from another
remained as immense as the gulf between the beliefs of a Jew and any
Christian, or between any orthodox religious believer and a deist.

The
founders did not want doctrinal differences to wreak civic havoc of the
kind then evident throughout Europe. That is why they left not only
Jesus but indeed any deity out of the Constitution. That the American
population was and is overwhelmingly Christian is a fact. That makes it
all the more remarkable that the founders did not establish a Christian government.

Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
By signing up, you certify that you are female and accept the Terms of Service and have read the
Privacy Policy.